Gleick Quotes

#1. When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?

James Gleick

#2. Mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.

James Gleick

#3. The universe is computing its own destiny.

James Gleick

#4. In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.

James Gleick

#5. It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think not. D'Arcy Thompson

James Gleick

#6. He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers "are always on the outside making stupid remarks," he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.

James Gleick

#7. It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

James Gleick

#8. Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

James Gleick

#9. Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.

James Gleick

#10. Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction.

James Gleick

#11. Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,

James Gleick

#12. The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

James Gleick

#13. I'm trying to look at many, many things in modern life that I believe are going faster, and I'm trying to look at why they're going faster and what effect they have on us. We all know about FedEx and instant pudding, but it doesn't mean we've looked at all the consequences of our desire for speed.

James Gleick

#14. Chaos is a creator of information - another apparent paradox.

James Gleick

#15. The universe computes its own destiny.

James Gleick

#16. Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

James Gleick

#17. For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes.

James Gleick

#18. You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

James Gleick

#19. The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

James Gleick

#20. During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

James Gleick

#21. Type 'What is th' and faster than you can find the 'e' Google is sending choices back at you: 'What is the cloud?' 'What is the mean?' 'What is the American dream?' 'What is the illuminati?' Google is trying to read your mind. Only it's not your mind. It's the World Brain.

James Gleick

#22. It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad.

James Gleick

#23. Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

James Gleick

#24. In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.

James Gleick

#25. Riches have never made people great but love does it every day - we

James Gleick

#26. But information is physical.

James Gleick

#27. The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from interconnectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion.

James Gleick

#28. You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment ...

James Gleick

#29. We will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.

James Gleick

#30. Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.

James Gleick

#31. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

James Gleick

#32. It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

James Gleick

#33. Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing.

James Gleick

#34. "Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

James Gleick

#35. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The

James Gleick

#36. He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

James Gleick

#37. To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

James Gleick

#38. IN THE MIND'S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

James Gleick

#39. Bits in the ether.

James Gleick

#40. Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. - David L. Watson

James Gleick

#41. I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.

James Gleick

#42. There are degrees of screwed.

Peter H. Gleick

#43. Cyberspace as a mode of being will never go away. We live in cyberspace.

James Gleick

#44. For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.

James Gleick

#45. Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.

James Gleick

#46. Human computers had no future, he saw:

James Gleick

#47. God plays dice with the universe," is Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.

James Gleick

#48. So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

James Gleick

#49. I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.

James Gleick

#50. If instantaneity is what we want, television cannot compete with cyberspace.

James Gleick

#51. Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.

James Gleick

#52. Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

James Gleick

#53. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

James Gleick

#54. The Selfish Gene - he set off decades of debate by declaring: We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

James Gleick

#55. He was going to kill Russell's dream of a perfect logical system.

James Gleick

#56. Particle physicists may freeze a second, open it up, and explore its dappled contents like surgeons pawing through an abdomen, but in real life, when events occur within thousandths of a second, our minds cannot distinguish past from future.

James Gleick

#57. We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.

James Gleick

#58. At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

James Gleick

#59. Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

James Gleick

#60. When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph.

James Gleick

#61. (The code became known as the dot-and-dash alphabet, but the unmentioned space remained just as important; Morse code was not a binary language.*) That

James Gleick

#62. He was going to show that the paradoxes were not excrescences; they were fundamental.

James Gleick

#63. Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: information theory.

James Gleick

#64. The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

James Gleick

#65. Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

James Gleick

#66. How would we feel if you could pay extra to smoke on airplanes? When we decide something is a bad idea in general for society, we don't want the rich to be able to buy their way out of it.

Peter Gleick

#67. For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

James Gleick

#68. In general, I think people should be skeptical of the Internet as a reference tool because so much of what's on it is unreliable and costumed - a hall of mirrors.

James Gleick

#69. With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

James Gleick

#70. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

James Gleick

#71. I really don't think of myself as a science writer.

James Gleick

#72. Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? - RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

James Gleick

#73. Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel.

James Gleick

#74. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially. ... In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him. ... He is always and everywhere. ... He is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting.5

James Gleick

#75. I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

James Gleick

#76. Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.

James Gleick

#77. Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

James Gleick

#78. Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.

James Gleick

#79. Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.

James Gleick

#80. The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness,

James Gleick

#81. A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.

James Gleick

#82. I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.

James Gleick

#83. Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.

James Gleick

#84. One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the runways.

James Gleick

#85. As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good.

James Gleick

#86. Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

James Gleick

#87. We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.

James Gleick

#88. From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action.

James Gleick

#89. They could see from the start that Wilson's idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless - but on which side of the border?

James Gleick

#90. I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. - Richard Feynman

James Gleick

#91. Measured in bits or their drolly named quantum counterpart, qubits.

James Gleick

#92. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

James Gleick

#93. Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

James Gleick

#94. Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

James Gleick

#95. The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.

James Gleick

#96. Running for president is the new selfie.

James Gleick

#97. a confused heap of mingle-mangle").

James Gleick

#98. information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.

James Gleick

#99. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

James Gleick

#100. This isn't about 'causality' but about 'influence'. The evidence is clear that human-induced climate change is influencing the drought, no matter the cause.

Peter Gleick